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How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility?
theduck writes "Ever suspected (or feared) that web users are mostly mindless sheep evaluating your website more by the eye candy than your carefully crafted content? Well, it appears you were right. A study resulting from a collaboration between Consumer Webwatch and The Stanford Pervasive technology Lab reports that even though consumers say that they look for content first when evaluating the credibility of a website, they actually focus primarily on design look and information design/structure (i.e. ease of navigation). Of course, the study's methodology might have something to do with the results..."
What good is the best content in the world if it's difficult to navigate your way through it?
In real life communication people are able to get much non-verbal information from the speaker, giving hints as to whether they are passionate about their topic of conversation, or even whether they really believe it or not.
While ultimately the content itself is paramount, having a well-designed site will show visitors that you at least care enough about it to put some effort it.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
...and what they're looking for. Obviously a site that is impossible to navigate is't going to be very popular, but the savvy user who knows what he/she is looking for will certaintly be more focused on content than presentation.
Of course, the 'internet surfer', who is typically not looking for anything specific, is more likely to be captivated by 'shiney things'. Given the nature of the study's methods, I'm thinking that was the case.
Since there was no guarantee that the person in question had any interest whatsoever in what they were showed, how could they honestly judge the page based on *content*?
=Smidge=
Content is important, but if you make it hard to get at it'd be bad. I don't think people go to a site looking for info, say 'this is ugly' and decide to try and find a prettier site to get their info from. If you're a web designer or a graphic design guy, and your webspace looks bad, then the content would have more to do with it...it really depends on your sites focus / intended audience.
Simple.
1. Does it have what I'm looking for.
2. Is it easy to get there.
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
It's a combination of the two, design + content, that makes a site sell and be credible.
A site which has no content but has a nice design is pretty worthless, and a site with a lot of content but no way of finding the information you need easily is just a way to scare off customers.
I don't have a problem with sites using flash liberally, so long as they provide a non-flash way to get to the same information on the web site. This is especially important for an index page...you ought to allow people into the site without them having to wait for your animation to download.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Here's an alternative thesis.
Is it possible to say that poorly designed websites reflect a certain apathy on the web designer's part? Surely (the argument goes), if designers didn't care enough about the design, they wouldn't have cared enough about the info they provide.
Now, that's a statement that wouldn't apply to me. I use Opera 6.05 to navigate, so I get more than my usual share of poor design (bad html, javascript, MS-proprietary tags etc). However, personally I don't care; my focus has always been on finding the info I want, for which I use the excellent the find-in-page and the google search buttons that Opera provides.
Bottomline: It's probably not poor navigation per se, but a bad impression on the viewer.
More than mere navel gazing.
But the best websites seem to do both. e.g. amazon.com, cnn.com. They make truly extensive use of tables and images to present headers, trailers, footers, concurrent columns, etc in a very appealing eye-candy way. They are even navigable from browsers like lynx, because they've avoided imagemaps and flash (which I regard as truly unnavigable).
Oh one more thing. Atleast I have noticed that I tend to nowadays first have a look in the methodology used to do the study, especially if it is related to the internet. Otherwise, you might just after reading a gazillion of pages realize that the whole study is absurd.
I don't believe that holds true for all users or all types of information. The more detailed the information you seek, the less concerned you are with the look of the site. Example: I've been thinking about building a guitar, and have literally spent hours reading articles at Frank Ford's site. That's one of the plainest web pages you could imagine, but the information there is pure gold.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Not quite.
:)
They also turn off CSS to make sure it degrades well, read the source to make sure it's not just a soup of DIVs or TABLEs and has some decent semantic content, make sure it doesn't use javascript: links, see if any links are not seperated by only whitespace, see if visual media is also provided in a text form, and check to see if they serve application/xhtml+xml to accepting clients.
What? Why is everyone looking at me funny?
Oh, right, I forgot the "then steal anything that looks good" step. Sorry
Its all about what's appropriate.
I know some people who hate all web applets on principle. I know a lot of people who hate all flash on principle. But what the whole thing really boils down to is this:
Does it add anything to the site, without taking anything away?
Flash with no way to avoid it detracts from the site because people with slow connections are inconvienved. Fancy applets everywhere detract from the site because not all browsers can handle them.
But applets that add optional extra usability, or flash navigational elements with a HTML alternative are fine by me.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Code that runs perfectly but is uncommented, undocumented, and mostly consists of one 3000 line file titled main.cpp with five methods == bad code
The distinction between information and data is critical. If Site A has the data I want, but Site B has it and has already intelligently decomposed it into information for me, then Site B wins. It's not even a distinction that only matters to non-power users; any thoughtful person will prefer to spend less time digesting data into information and more time applying that information in interesting ways. This is a dynamic that is seen in good coding practice, in (G)UI design, in web design, in short, in any sort of content presentation.
This is not to defend presentations that _obscure_ the information being presented, but rather to highlight the importance of _correct_ content presentation. Clarity of presentation is a creature of balance; neither too little nor too much. If Flash can make your information clearer, use it. If Flash obscures your information, ditch it.
Of course they judged the books first by their cover. We do it with books, with the people we meet, with stores at the mall and around town!
We need to do that. It helps us decide whether we want to pursure things further or move on to the next thing. Otherwise we would have to fully investigate everything.
Does it work 100%? No, but it works well enough that nobody is going to stop doing it.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
So has anyone actually read the article before posting, and, if so, what are they on?
Virtually serving coffee
I have always expected and known this to be the case. It's the same with operating systems. Kde and Windows XP have a professional, clean, consistent look. Even if they both crashed frequently (not saying they do or not), users would still likely favor the one that looks newer, cleaner and more professional.
:)
When viewing a website that has been carefully constructed to look nice, then you feel like the person has put in a lot of effort. You *think* this means that it has been worked on longer, and more people have had time to view the content, and more thought has been put into it.
When you see a website with a black background, yellow text, and out of place images, you feel like the person has not put much effort in, and therefore the credibility of the website is suspect.
Sometimes this may be true, sometimes not, but I'm certain that this should have been obvious without a survey.
This is why some password thieves spent a lot of time on a fraudulent e-mail that they sent out to many ICQ users, myself included. It looked just like an official ICQ e-mail, every single link and image was loaded directly from the icq.com domain. The only exception was one link - the submit form. So while 99% of users would look at it, click a few links and see it goes to the icq.com website, and see the professional layout - a few would notice it was suspect purely because it was asking for our password because of some security problem.
We've come to associate professional design with companies, and to us that means quality. Brand name merchandise, clean stores, open spaces, etc. When a website is unclean, it feels like it has been done by a small business, someone without the greater know-how. Problem is, the open-source movement has very few good artists compared to programmers
Is it just me or does everyone interpret sites with tiny font sizes as credible? (The article in point, too.)
Perhaps it's just a pet peeve, but I would much rather have a sizable (not hard-coded) font size rather than a miniscule one where I can't resize it. To me, usability reflects a level of expertise and understandingand is more likely to garner my optimistic impressions ("credibility") of the site's owner.
My $0.02.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
I agree that any site that requires Flash or cookies gets a big thumbs down. I don't think it's the credibility that's harmed, though. It's the usability (principally because of the download times for us modem users in the Flash case).
If the same site let me see a simple front page with the same content but no Flash animation, so I can download it and use it some time today, then maybe I'd rate it very highly if it still gave me the information I wanted easily.
If a site provides reasonable defaults without cookies, which it should be able to do if it just uses them to store my preferences as they were intended, then again, WTP? If I want to store the preferences, I'll enable cookies for the site. If not, I won't.
Even ads don't damage a site's credibility in my eyes, if they're done responsibly. I don't mind a banner ad or two that support a page. I find pop-up ads irritating, but these mostly seem to be put there by web hosting companies rather than the actual authors of a page I'm reading, so I tend to discount them as well. The only ads thing that really hurts a page in my eyes is being nasty about it. If I visit a travel agent's site, and when I've finished I close the window to find seventeen different ad windows for holidays I haven't even asked about, I'm never going back.
I guess you could argue that even this last case is really usability, but there comes a point where a site is sufficiently hard to use, or disregards the feelings of its visitors to such an extent, that it becomes a credibility problem as well.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I have a short attention span. I need moving and flashing things to attract me.
The Art of Illusion page borred me after the first sentence. So I still don't know what this site is about, since I continued elsewhere my quest for more exciting eye candies.
Contrary to popular /. belief, good design does matter, and here's why: If you were a website owner and planning on generating traffic and gaining a good reputation, you would make sure you have two things - good content, and good design. When users go to sites by big companies they know will be around for a long time like IBM, Dell, Yahoo, etc., and see an attractive and professional layout, they begin to associate that with trust. No-one believes that these companies are being anything but completely honest on their websites. Compare that with teds-sweet-deals.com with crappy layout and an ugly page. It looks like a fly-by-night operation and it certainly doesn't look like Dell.com, so who are you going to trust?
That being said, I think users know the difference between an e-commerce site and a personal non-profit site, and there's lots more leeway in the latter case, which can actually backfire for companies that like to astroturf. An example of this is websites for Amanda Latona (a wannabe pop diva being groomed by the major labels for commercial success). A lot of the "fan" websites seem a little too slick to be real.
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